"If
you want to prove that God is not dead...first prove that man is alive."
—Rod Serling

Quest
is foregoing its usual editorial comment so that we may bring you the speech
given by Mr. Rod Serling during the course of his day-long visit to Moorpark
College on December 3, 1968.We
feel no words of ours could carry the impact of this speech, as its message is
universal in scope.It applies, not
only to young and old, conservative and liberal (including both extremes), but
most importantly to that vast middle-of-the-road group.A group comprising the backbone of America.

Quest
is honored to be able to present these words.America may yet take her rightful place in a brave new world, if men like
Rod Serling continue to speak out.

There
seem to have arisen some complications relevant to my appearance here this
evening that should be clarified before I begin.Plainly and simply.I
refused to sign a loyalty oath which was submitted to me as a prerequisite both
for my appearance and my pay. I
gather that your local newspaper and some of its readers read dire and menacing
implications in this refusal of mine, and I broach the whole thing only by way
of a kind of personal disclaimer.

Number
one, I have no interest in overthrowing the government of the United States and
number two, to the best of my knowledge I have not or am not now a member of a
subversive organization whose aims are similar.I know there are many of you out there who’ve put me in a genetic
classification of someplace between a misanthropic kook and an ungracious dope.Actually, I’m neither.I
did not sign the loyalty oath and I waived my normal speaking fee, only because
of a principle.I think a requirement that a man affix his signature to a
document, reaffirming loyalty, in on one hand ludicrous—and on the other
demeaning.

A
time-honored concept of Anglo-Saxon justice declares that a man is innocent
until proven guilty.I believe that
in a democratic society a man is similarly loyal until proven disloyal.No testaments of faith, no protestations of affection for his native
load, and no amount of signatures will prove a bloody thing—one way or the
other as to a man’s patriotism or lack thereof.The concept of the loyalty oath is a new one in the United States—in
its present form it dates back less than twenty years.It’s been around for a number of decades in different countries under
decidedly different forms of government.It
was a requirement in Nazi Germany and in Fascist Italy, and is currently a
prerequisite for the status of citizenship in the Soviet Union.

Under
dictators, the so-called loyalty oath is a necessary adjunct to a relationship
between man and his government.Both
the Fascists and the Communists have a pathological distrust of their own
people.To require a signature
under an oath of allegiance seems to me or presume guilt and an attendant
disloyalty.I simply can’t honor
that kind of premise—and I won’t honor it.And it’s for that reason that I did not sign the oath required of me to
speak here for pay.But
parenthetically it might be noted that if indeed, I were hell bent to subvert
the government of the United States, I would certainly have no qualms about
signing anything.

But
so much for my own idiosyncrasies.I’d
like to talk to you tonight about the generation gap as it applies to what’s
going on.I find myself in the
uncomfortable and almost untenable position of a man in the middle—the
so-called moderate liberal whose roots go deep into the American soil, pounded
there by immigrant parents who fled Eastern Europe during the nineteenth century
because that peculiar breed of flag-wavers on the other side had taken upon
themselves to the prerogative of choosing who should survive and who should not.

Because
of this particular background there are certain gut-deep philosophies and
attitudes that are a part of my bone marrow—unshakable and unswervable.I will salute our flag and stand for our anthem and feel an affection for
my native land with the kind of fervor and admitted emotionalism that would be
peculiar especially to a fat-cat Hollywood writer whose father was an uneducated
butcher.This, on the face of it,
removes me from the pale of the new left.It
sets me apart—and I suppose in their view, places me dead center in the
basement of the establishment.

But
I’ll tell you something.Reserving
certain criticism and negative judgment as to methodology, I nonetheless
subscribe to and support what are the goals and aspirations of America’s
young.I am much more prone to
embrace their causes that I am any cause which would see the perpetuating of
certain aged and no longer applicable concepts of ethics, mores, moralities,
more peculiar to my own generation.

I
would rather have a son or daughter of mine march through the streets of Chicago
protesting injustice—than I would siring a Chicago policeman who’ll club
anyone who’ll get in his way—and that includes sixteen-year-olds, newspaper
photographers, and senior citizens.

And if anyone wants to raise the spectre of
“provocation”—I say this categorically.There is no provocation extant short of a motive of self defense to
excuse as representative of law and order wading in with a billy-club under the
pretense of saving the sovereign city of Chicago.Of the four hundred young people currently held under
arraignment for so-called assault and battery, half of them are under eighteen
and half of those under a hundred and twenty pounds.

Suddenly we are a nation whose
new battle slogan is law and order.Last
year it won countless numbers of elections.It’s the great new American euphemism.Law and Order.It is now interchangeable with God, Motherhood, the
Constitution and the Holy Grail.But
how empty and how suspect is this sloganry when it points up the incredible
selectivity on the part of America’s citizenry—how picky and choosey they
are when it comes to moral outrage.

There was no hue and cry for a
re-examination of American conscience when four little Negro girls were bombed
to pieces in a Birmingham church.There
was no collective gasp of offense when three young civil rights workers were
slaughtered in Mississippi.There
were no slogans at all attending the bombing off over a hundred churches in the
south in the past five years, or the fact that there have only been two lawyers,
available to defend civil rights cases in the state of Mississippi until last
year—or that juries were all white—or that a white man accused of first
degree homicide has never, in the history of the south, been given a sentence
commensurate with the proven charge.Or
we could go down the list of flagrant violations of law and order as they have
existed for the past hundred years—beginning with the five thousand lynchings.

These assaults on conscience we
live with, and nobody cries out for law and order.For a quarter of a century, in the Congress of the United
States, we tried to get passed an anti-lynching bill.A simple law to protect the lives of black citizens below the Mason-Dixon
line.This was not legislation, as
our protesting brethren so often take us to task for—the legislation of
brotherly love with they say is impossible.It was a law making it a federal offense to hang a human being from a
tree, cover him with kerosene and cremate him.But the loudest cheerleaders of our current law and order rallies—the
Eastlands and the Strom Thurmonds—were the very gentlemen who fought against
that legislation until it was ultimately passed.

It’s hardly a revelation to
me that the young people in this country take a dim view of our current
up-tightness when it comes to street rioting.They believe, and I think quite properly, that on the scale of
misbehavior the black man who takes a torch to a building or breaks a window to
loot, and does so out of passion, is less the criminal than the white man who
puts his torch to human beings and does so with a cold, calculated, predatory
pre-planned blueprint of destruction.

The black man, because he’s
suffered this for over a hundred years, looks upon us as a convocation of
lizards—a cold blooded species of being who will call out the national guard
to keep a ghetto from being burned down—but will raise no finger, let alone an
octave of voice, to protest what has been done to him over the past century.

Look
across that generation gap now and see it as they see it—the young.Thirty two billion dollars into a civil war ten thousand miles from our
shore to protect the freedom of the South Vietnamese and keep the Viet Cong from
attacking San Francisco.That’s
where we are told is America’s destiny—in the rice paddies of DaNang.And America’s youth—or at least a sizeable share of them—find this
to be patently unbelievable.

America’s destiny, in their
view, lies on the streets of Newark, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles and Harlem.That’s where we keep alive the dream.Not in Saigon.And certainly
not at the cost of twenty-thousand dead American boys with a hundred-thousand
wounded and a half a million civilians put to a torch.Again, the inconsistencies.The
Hawks who bleat most loudly for our continuing participation in this war—these
are the ones who’ve passed the propositions 14—and woe be unto the oriental
who has the temerity to put a garbage can next to his.Again inconsistency.

Those who shout loudest for
fiscal sanity—an end to so-called federal handouts.Stop this nonsense about Federal Aid to education, federal
housing, aid to cities.These are
the gentlemen who watched us throw two billion dollars to help prop up the
French Colonial Government whose good offices are indistinguishable from the
North Vietnamese.

What don’t we like about the
enemy?They imprison people without
trial.They stifle free speech.They close down newspapers.They
rig elections.Every objective and
dispassionate view presented to us by bona fide journalists, historians and
intelligent observers, are uniformly critical of all the governments of
Vietnam—the North, the South and the French.So what, indeed, are we defending there?

If it’s simply a Dean Rusk
would have us believe—that the north should return to their side of the fence
and the south remain on theirs, it might be pointed out that Premier Ky and
President Thieu are both northerners and it points up again the fact that this
is a civil war.And if
precedentially we must leave our native soil to attack any government that
displeases us, we have opened ourselves up one helluva can of peas.We’d best load up the ships for South America, Greece, Eastern Europe
and elsewhere—where governments exist without the sanction of their people.And we will have embarked on an international adventure that has no end
and at a cost that is incomprehensible.

What turns that younger
generation off?Examine, if you
will, the candidacy of George Wallace.That
political stalwart who made a public quote that he would never be out-niggered
again.This from the man running
for the highest office in the land.And
though a fraternity of wishful thinkers tell us he’s been discredited, the
young are much more realistic.They
look at his ten million votes.they
look at his thirteen percent share of the ballot, one out of seven.And they realize that had California gone to Humphrey—we might on this
very day still not have a president-elect.

Let
me, at this juncture, play devil’s advocate.I’ve reserved my criticism for my generation.Let’s examine both the pot and the kettle.The campus of San Francisco State University, for example.I’ll say this unequivocally.For
students to disrupt classes, to shout down opposing voices of argument, to tear
up public property and to foist their will—however just their cause and
legitimate their grievances—is an act of criminal, stupid, self-defeating
insanity.

The very things they seek:
equal education, equal voices, a decent regard and respect for the rights of
all—these are the things they throw aside when they practice their own special
thing—the introduction of anarchy.And
they do something else that is almost suicidal.They dissolve whatever possible support and understanding
that might be forthcoming.And
no—repeat—no social pressure can succeed on any level without support.We’ve seen this phenomena before—when you cannot argue with a man,
you either belt him in the mouth or shout him down.That may be an emotional cathartic but it does nothing to advance a
cause.

Now where does it all end?The generation gap that looks with jaundiced youthful eyes at the war,
the draft, deeply embedded social inequality and the worship of anachronisms
which have become more ritualistic than real.There are two quotes that I think applicable, albeit abstract, and I ask
for your indulgence when I march out quotations.This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are
over forty.The young smoke
pot—we inhale from our Bartlett’s.

The first quote is on the
tombstone of Martin Luther King, Jr.It
comes from the book of Genesis: “They said to one another, Behold, here cometh
the dreamer...let us slay him...and we shall see what might become of his
dreams.”Scott Fitzgerald said,
“In the dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.”During this long night of our souls there have been other dreamers and
they, too, have been slain.John
Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Medger Evers, King, and others.Each had his dream and each paid his price.And I’ll tell you what this dream is.It’s pointed up by an apocryphal story.

When Goethe lay dying he was
supposed to have opened his eyes in the last moment before death and said,
“Light.please give me more
light.A hundred years later, the
Spanish philosopher, Uno Mono, upon hearing what Goethe said, said,
“Impossible, Goethe could not have said that.he would have never asked for light.he would have said, ‘Warmth...let there be warmth.’Men do not die of the darkness...they die of the cold.It is the frost that kills.That’s what the dream is.That’s
what it’s all about.The oneness
of men.”

What
is the generation gap?It’s the
plaintive and desperate cry of the young that men should be one.If we can ever accomplish this, understand it, assimilate it, act from
its premise—that elusive dream might take on form.

That,
my friends, is what I think it’s all about.I think the destiny of all men is not to sit in the rubble of their own
making but to reach out for an ultimate perfection which is to be had.At the moment, it is a dream.But as of the moment we clasp hands with our neighbor, we build the first
span to bridge the gap between the young and the old.At this hour, it’s a wish.But we have it within our power to make it a reality.If you want to prove that God is not dead, first prove that man is alive.

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